Making the most of individual differences in joint decisions

Evidence for and against the idea that “two heads are better than one” is abundant. This chapter considers the contextual conditions and social norms that predict madness or wisdom of crowds to identify the adaptive value of collective decision-making beyond increased accuracy. Similarity of competence among members of a collective impacts collective accuracy, but interacting individuals often seem to operate under the assumption that they are equally competent even when direct evidence suggest the opposite and dyadic performance suffers. Cross-cultural data from Iran, China, and Denmark support this assumption of similarity (i.e., equality bias) as a sensible heuristic that works most of the time and simplifies social interaction. Crowds often trade off accuracy for other collective benefits such as diffusion of responsibility and reduction of regret. Consequently, two heads are sometimes better than one, but no-one holds the collective accountable, not even for the most disastrous of outcomes

Cognitive psychology · Crowds · Economics · Machine learning · Positive economics · Regret · Computer Science · Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence · Psychology · Social Psychology · Metacognition · Artificial Intelligence

• Introducing a Wisdom of the Crowd’s Process Model for Achieving Effective Crowd Performance

  Open Access•Ji Yu, Ali Intezari Harsini et al.•Group Decision and Negotiation•2026

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